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How can I turn from Africa and live?

Derek Walcott

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Derek Walcott
Age: 87 †
Born: 1930
Born: January 23
Died: 2017
Died: March 17
Author
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
Derek Alton Walcott
Sir Derek Alton Walcott
Africa
Turn
Turns
Live

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Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
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To change your language you must change your life.
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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
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I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
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The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
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For every poet it is always morning in the world history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.
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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
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The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.
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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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What are men? Children who doubt.
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When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
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Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.
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I read I travel I become
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The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
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We look and see what we see in a mirror, and we believe it. That's important, the question of belief. The question is: Should we believe what we see in a mirror?
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The poem is itself a mirror.
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Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe. I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.
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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
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I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
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